Australian man kills his 3 young sons on Father's Day

By David J. Krajicek

Jun 16, 2018 | 3:00 PM

Robert Farquharson plunged his car into a pond in Australia in 2005, killing his three sons. (Handout)

By his telling, Robert Farquharson blacked out from a coughing jag as he tooled along an expressway southwest of Melbourne, Australia, after spending Sept. 4, 2005 — that nation's Father's Day — with his three young sons.

He was returning the boys to his estranged wife, Cindy Gambino, when his car veered off Princes Highway near the village of Winchelsea.

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Farquharson, 37, said he awoke to hear his oldest son, Jai, holler, "Dad, we're in water!"

Their car had rumbled over the gravel median, crossed the oncoming lanes, crashed through a fence, skirted a row of trees and run into a farm pond.

Farquharson escaped the sedan just before it "nosedived" to the bottom.

His sons — Jai, 10; Tyler, 7; and Bailey, 2 — were still inside.

Shane Atkinson, a passerby who found Farquharson dripping wet beside the highway, was surprised the father refused to return to the pond or even call police.

"I've got the tell the missus that I've killed the kids," he insisted.

The Aussie writer Helen Garner later gave voice to her country's collective reaction to the calamity: "Oh Lord, let this be an accident."

Farquharson and Gambino had been a couple since the early 1990s.

At 37, he was short, chunky and under-educated — an "unassuming country bloke," friends told the press. He was socially inhibited and had a temper, but he seemed to love his sons, who grew up sharing their Poppy's enthusiasm for his beloved Essendon Bombers, the Aussie football team based in a Melbourne suburb.

The couple labored for a living. They rented in Winchelsea but saved a bit each week for their dream of building a house.

That work began with the arrival of their third son in 2012. But swelling financial stress left Farquharson aloof and depressed, and Gambino grumbled that home ownership was more nightmare than dream.

"It's a mortgage, not a marriage," she told a friend. "I'm over it."

In November 2004 she ordered Farquharson out and filed for divorce. The couple seemed to have a strained but cordial relationship, with shared custody.

But Farquharson had one quibble that ate away at him. They owned a pair of automobiles, both no-frills Holden Commodores. She kept the newer silver one. He got the old white one.

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Farquharson ground his teeth when he saw Gambino's new boyfriend, Stephen Moules, driving the silver Commodore around Winchelsea.

And now the white Commodore lay at the bottom of a pond.

Farquharson was still wet when he appeared at Gambino's door that Father's Day night.

"I've had an accident," he said. "I couldn't get the kids. They're in the water. It's too late."

Guided by Farquharson, Moules and Gambino rushed back to the pond, where the boyfriend dove into the dark, cold water even before rescuers arrived. It was indeed too late. Divers retrieved the bodies from 25 feet down the next day.

Investigators were suspicious. How could Farquharson swim away with his sons still in the car, then fail to immediately call for help?

Yet Gambino stood by her ex. They attended the boys' funeral together, weeping in tandem as they emerged in a clutch from church.

But the probe soon took a dark turn when the father's friend Greg King recounted a chat he had with Farquharson three months earlier at a fish-and-chip shop.

Farquharson told King he had a surprise for Gambino to "pay her back big time."

When King asked what he planned, "He stared me in the eyes and said, 'Kill them.'"

He sketched out details of a watery "accident" on Father's Day. He told King, "And then every Father's Day she would suffer for the rest of her life."

Farquharson was charged with murder, but even then Gambino was unconvinced.

Robert Farquharson at Melbourne Supreme Court for the first day of his retrial in may 2010. (Fairfax Media via Getty Images)

"I believe with all my heart that this was just an accident and that he would not have hurt a hair on their heads," she testified at a hearing.

Evidence at his trial in August 2007 included an interrogation of Farquharson by Sgt. Gerard Clanchy two days after the wreck.

"I managed to get out, and then all of a sudden we were going down, and I tried to get around to the other side, and I couldn't," he said. "I must have just said, 'Hold on, hold on'…It just nosedived."

He added, "I'd do anything to have them back, and I've got to live with this for the rest of my life."

But King's testimony about the foreboding conversation stood out among the 49 witnesses. Medical experts cast doubt on the coughing blackout, and Shane Atkinson, who drove Farquharson to Gambino's, gave a shocking account of the father's indifference to the obvious urgent need for lifesaving.

Farquharson was convicted of murder, but that result was overturned on appeal based on technical errors by the judge.

A second jury reached the same verdict in a 2010 do-over. Farquharson was sent to prison for life, with a minimum term of 33 years. He was ordered to compensate his ex-wife $225,000 for her grief — $75,000 per child.

"Looking back now, I wonder what on earth I was thinking," Gambino told the Melbourne Herald Sun days after the second trial. "But I was in so much pain after losing the children that those first couple of years were a blur, and denial was my only way of surviving."